John W. Sharp on eHealth and Health IT

Archive for August 26th, 2009

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies includes an evaluation of cloud computing. They view cloud computing as being at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. While companies look to the cloud for cost effective solutions, “The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy…”
Another post on the Emerge Blog, sees cloud computing as a promise without hype noting three cloud based models:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

This is a helpful formulation especially since so many platforms are becoming available in the Cloud and specifically in health care: Google Health and Healthvault to mention just two. While there is still concern about security in cloud computing limiting its adoption in health care, these three models should be considered when talking about private and hybrid clouds more common in the future of health care.

Also of note is the expansion of cloud offerings from Amazon. Adoption of Amazon Web Services faces some barriers: “The single biggest barrier to enterprise adoption that exists today is the
reluctance to live with one foot in each of two worlds, the on-premise IT
infrastructure and the world of the cloud. What Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
aims to do is bridge those two worlds.”